Dot Style

Rosalind 'Roz' Chast is an American and staff cartoonist for the 'New Yorker'. Since 1978, she has published more than 800 cartoons in the New Yorker. In the book 'Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance', there is a section where Angela Duckworth captures rejection in the life of cartoonists after hearing Roz Chast speak at a local library in New York. Roz Chast, 68 years old and a celebrated cartoonist, shares that at this stage in her career, her rejection rate is 90%.?If she sends ten cartoons to The New Yorker for publishing, only one will get published. Angela Duckworth, who says she was shocked to hear Roz talk about her rejection rate percentage in the life of professional cartoonists, wanted to validate it and hence called?Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor for the New Yorker, was even more shocked when Bob responded saying, “Roz Chast is indeed an anomaly since most cartoonists live with even more rejection”.

At the 'New Yorker', 'contract cartoonists', who have dramatically better odds of getting published than anyone else,?collectively submit about 500 cartoons weekly. In a given issue, there is only room, on average,?for about 17 of them. Did you do the math??That’s a rejection rate of more than 96%.?While Angela Duckworth wondered who would keep going when the odds were that grim, she says she found the answer in Bob Mankoff himself.?Bob Mankoff’s story is all about dogged perseverance. Bob Mankoff was rejected by the 'New Yorker'?2000 times between 1974 and 1977?before the cartoon posted above that he sent was accepted.

How did Bob handle rejection and move ahead? As children, we were told?“Try, Try and Try Again. If something is not happening, keep working until it happens,”?and things like that. It was not very different for Bob Mankoff. The pile of rejection slips from the 'New Yorker', however suggested to Bob that “try, try again” was not working.?He decided to do something different. Bob went to the New York Public Library and looked at all the cartoons back to 1925 that had ever been printed in the 'New Yorker'. He first thought he did not draw well and was getting rejected, but he saw that some very successful New Yorker cartoonists were average. Then Bob thought that something might be awry with the length of his captions (too short or too long), but that was not an issue either. He wondered if his type of humor was missing the mark, but No. He saw some successful cartoons as whimsical, satirical, philosophical, and enjoyable.

However, the one thing all the cartoons had in common was this: they made the reader think. And there was another common thread: Every cartoonist had a personal style that was distinctively their own. There were only so many best styles.?Paging through literally every cartoon the New Yorker had ever published, Bob knew he could do as well. Or even better. “I thought, I can do this, I can do this, I had complete confidence”. He knew he could draw cartoons that would make people think, and he knew he could develop his style.?I worked through various styles and eventually did my dot style. The now-famous dot style of Bob’s cartoons is called 'stippling', and Bob had initially tried it out back in high school when he discovered the French impressionist Georges Seurat. What followed next was interesting. He sold?13 cartoons to the New Yorker in 1978 and then 25 the following year, then 27 in the next year. In 1981, Bob received a letter from the magazine asking if he would consider becoming a contract cartoonist. He said?Yes.

Connecting the dots can reduce the rejection rates!